How To Install and Use EasyEngine (ee) on Ubuntu

EasyEngine (ee) is a linux shell-script collection, which makes managing your WordPress and Nginx sites on an Ubuntu server easy and fun. EasyEngine makes it very easy to manage Nginx and we will no longer need to recall complex commands or depend on system administrators. As an interface for Nginx, EasyEngine is known to perform better and faster than Apache, particularly when the number of concurrent site visitors is on the rise.

Easy Engine would work on any Debian-based distribution, but for these tutorial we are using Ubuntu. Most of the official tests are also done on Ubuntu. In order to install it our Ubuntu server, we need to have full root access. Installation process consists of several commands and it is actually pretty simple and straight forward:

# curl -sL rt.cx/ee | sudo bash
# ee system install

The first command will install easy engine, and the second command will install all other required packages. EE will always install the latest stable version of the packages (Latest PHP, MySQL, etc.) During the installation we will get few prompts where we need to answer “yes” in order for the installation to complete. Once we have it installed, we can create new wordpress with the command:

# ee site create our-domain.com --wp

This will create and install fresh and clean WordPress installation that will be accessible at http://our-domain.com. EasyEngine supports several types of WordPress websites as well as non WordPress websites. Here is a list of all websites and commands to create them:

Different configuration options for EasyEngine can be set in the /etc/easyengine/ee.conf file. We can choose to use remote MySQL host, set basic HTTP authentication, default username and password for new wordpress installations, etc. All we have to do is open the file and using our favorite text editor and do the changes. The file is very well documented.

Upgrading easy engine is the latest version is also very easy. If we are upgrading from easyengine 1.0 to 1.1 and above, we should use the command:

# /bin/bash
If we are upgrading from version 1.1 and above we should use the command
# ee update

This concludes the easy part, installation and configuration. According to EasyEngine created, the hardest part is the create WordPress page with high traffic and heavy enough to crash it. So, you can give it a try on your VPS.